Beverly is a small custom furniture manufacturer in Pomona, California. At Beverly, I got to do many projects; from creating the social media posts and newsletters, to redesiging the website and logo and being the assistant editor of the Room Service Catalog.

I joined Beverly as a designer after a change in CEO, and under a newly hired Marketing Director. The idea was to redesign the entire business with the creation of a new product catalog, Room Service, a website redesign (and an e-commerce site), and an app store app.
Our goal was to modernize the company and attract new customers as the company entered new territory by attending Trade Shows such as High Point Market.

Beverly’s clients were interior designers and online retailers. While Beverly specialized in custom high-end furniture, sometimes they did individual client work such as restorations--this was not the audience we wanted to focus engagement with. Because the main goal was to attract more interior designers, our persona became Kim (the CEO's wife), or rather, a fictionalized and generalized version of Kim, because she was an interior designer.

Beverly’s first logo was created by the son of the CEO, after many years, it was changed by the marketing director who hired me (second image). The marketing director wasn’t content with the current design and wanted to lighten the color scheme so that the website could also match the light theme. He wanted to keep the ‘b’ but he asked me to make it more “light.”

When we began working on the website I was told to not alter the front page **except for the background** because the CEO had paid someone to design it with the dark color scheme. (later this changed)

Our team consisted of me, a developer, and the Marketing Director. He created a lot of the tasks I was to complete, and gave me guidance in their design and implementation. For a short period of time, we had another graphic designer join when the task of redesigning the website and expanding the online shop became too much for both of us alone.

One of the biggest problems we faced at Beverly was the sense of uncertainty. The company had been under a lot of financial hardship and the redesign was it’s last effort at reestablishing itself. New management and old management often collided in what they believed the future was which left us with a lot of misdirection. Our biggest deadlines were always trade shows because that was when they had the best sales. For the entirety of 2015 a new project was completed before every trade show Beverly attended.

My time at Beverly was a success because we brought the company to new peaks. At the third trade show the company presented at in 2015, we ended up selling all the pieces before the show even began. The company grew an online following, and the online shop brought in many new clients.

Of course there are things I would change and would have preferred to do differently. I didn’t have the creative freedom I would have liked, but that’s part of designing for a pre-existing brand as opposed to creating your own. I had to learn to build on top of what previous employees had created before me.

The biggest issue we had during my time there was with the website, it had been designed by someone else, so when my deadline was set the company didn’t have the credentials to edit the code, which ended up giving us a very limited time to make the changes we ended up needing.